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John Pilger

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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

John Pilger:Australia's Julia Gillard is no feminist hero

The Guardian's description of Australia's opposition leader Tony
Abbott as "neanderthal" is not unreasonable. Misogyny is an Australian
blight and a craven reality in political life. But for so many
commentators around the world to describe Julia Gillard's attack on
Abbott as a "turning point for Australian women" is absurd. Promoted by
glass-ceiling feminists with scant interest in the actual politics and
actions of their hero, Gillard is the embodiment of the Australian Labor
Party machine - a numbers-crunching machine long bereft of principle
that has betrayed Australia's most vulnerable people, especially women.

Shortly
before Gillard's lauded rant against Abbott, her government forced
through legislation that stripped A$100 from the poorest single parents -
almost all of them women. Even Labor's own caucus reportedly regarded
this as "cruel". But that is nothing compared with Gillard's attacks on
Aboriginal people, who remain Australia's dirty secret, suffering
preventable diseases such as trachoma (blindness in children), which has
been eliminated in much of the developing world, and scourges that hark
back to Dickensian England, such as rheumatic heart disease, even
leprosy. I have seen Aboriginal homes in which 30 people are forced to
live, because the government refuses to build public housing for them.
Indigenous young people are incarcerated in Australian prisons at five
times the rate of black South Africans during the apartheid era.

Gillard
has continued with gusto the authoritarian and mendacious 2007
"emergency intervention" designed to push Aboriginal Australians off
their valuable land and box them into "hub centres": a version of
apartheid. She and her indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin have
implemented this inhumanity in defiance of international law. In a
speech last year, Gillard, like most of her predecessors, blamed the
victims of Australia's unresolved rapacious past and present. I have
just spent several months in Aboriginal Australia; and the views I have
gathered from remarkable, despairing, eloquent indigenous women of
Gillard and her "feminism" are mostly unknown or ignored or dismissed in
this country. Watching Gillard address the United Nations last month
and claim that Australia embraced "the highest ideals" of human rights
law was satirical, to say the least. Australia has been repeatedly
condemned by the UN for its racism.

Gillard came to power by
plotting secretly with an all-male cabal to depose the elected prime
minister. Kevin Rudd. Two of her conspirators, according to diplomatic
cables released by WikiLeaks, sought inspiration in the US embassy where
Gillard enjoyed an unusually high approval rating. This was
understandable.

Her views on aggressive war might be described as
neanderthal if they were not Victorian; referring to the dispatch of
Australian colonial troops to Sudan in 1885 to avenge a popular uprising
against the British, she described the forgotten bloody farce as "not
only a test of wartime courage, but a test of character that has helped
define our nation and create the sense of who we are." Invariably
flanked by flags, she uses such guff to justify sending more young
Australians to die in faraway places such as Afghanistan, essentially as
American mercenaries -- more soldiers have died under her watch than
that of any recent prime minister. Her true feminist distinction,
perversely, is her removal of gender discrimination in combat roles in
the Australian army. Thanks to her, women are now liberated to kill
Afghans and others who offer no threat to Australia. One Sydney feminist
commentator was beside herself. "Australia will again lead the world in
a major reform", she wrote. A passionate supporter of the Israeli
state, Gillard in 2009 went on a junket to Israel arranged by the
Australian Israel Cultural Exchange during which she refused to condemn
Israel's blood-fresh massacre of 1400 mostly women and children in Gaza.

With
political trickery reminiscent of the former arch-conservative prime
minister John Howard, Gillard has sought to circumvent Australian law in
order to send refugees who arrive by boat to an impoverished hell on
isolated Pacific islands, such as Nauru. According to the UN High
Commission for Refugees, these people are "90 per cent genuine
refugees". They include children who, as government studies show, go
insane in such confinement.

Australian feminism has a proud past.
With New Zealanders, Australian women led the world in winning the vote
and were at the forefront of the struggle for equal pay. During the
slaughter of the First World War, Australian women mounted a uniquely
successful campaign against a vote for conscription - known as "the
blood vote". On polling day, a majority of Australians followed the
women. That is feminism.

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"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction." Graham Greene

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Russell Crowe, Amanda Dole and myself outside Radio Redfern, May Day 1989. Russell had just performed a few songs on my show, Radio Solidarity. Amanda is an organiser for the National Union of Workers.

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Togs's Place.Com is a massive blog/web site. To get around and find articles you want or just explore, use the SEARCH BLOG, if you enter Noam Chomsky, you'll not only come up with numerous articles, speeches, interviews by and with Chomsky, but also being referred to in articles by Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Naomi Kline and myself. With Blogger you've got to scroll down from the most recent till the oldest. Every posting has a label ie, New Romans;Middle East from May 18 07 to today, this is a new system I've adopted for labels, previous labels on this topic were New Romans;Middle East 4, 3, 2, 1. These numbers go backwards to when I started this site in October 2006. New Romans;Middle East from May 18 07 to today will relabeled New Romans;Middle East from May 18 to June 10 07 for easy reference and the new label will be New Romans;Middle East from June 10 07 to today. The Recent Posts is the quick link to my Recent Postings. The Links can take you to 170 different web sites in Australia and around the World.

It's been a learning experience for me operating this blog but there is an insatiable hunger for alternative news and opinion on a range of issues in Australia that is often ignored or sidelined by the corporate media and an increasing self censored and Murdoch managed ABC.

Journalists and Writers I Like.

"Bread and work and love, the poor man’s trinity, and by all three needs they chain him down." Christina Stead 1902-1983 Seven Poor Men of Sydney

"Every government is run by liars and nothing should be believed." I.F.Stone 1907-89

"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult." Arthur Miler 1915-2005

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." George Orwell 1903-50

"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understandig the hidden agendas of the message that surrounds it." John Pilger

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war - for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more." Joesph Heller 1923-99

"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism." Graham Greene 1904-91

"My experience in the First World War and now the Second World War [his son Barney was killed in the Battle of Singapore] changed my outlook on things. It is hard to believe that there is a God. I feel the Bible is a book written by man but for the purpose of preying on a person’s conscience, and to confuse him. Anyone who taken part in a bayonet charge (and I have) [Gallipoli], and has managed to retain his proper senses, must doubt the truth of the Bible and the powers of God, if one exists. And considering the many hundreds of different religions that there are in this world of ours, and the fact that many religions have caused terrible wars and hatreds throughout the world, and that many religions that have hoarded tremendous wealth and property while people inside and outside religion are starving , it is difficult to remain a believer. No Sir, there is no God, it is only a myth." Albert Facey 1894-1982 A Fortunate Life

"Now take my case. I’m twenty-nine and have two brothers—one in the Liberal Party and one serving six years for rape and arson. My sister Peg is on the streets and Dad lives off her earnings. Mum is pregnant by the boarder and because of this Dad won’t marry her. Last night I got engaged to an ex-prostitute and I wish to be fair to her: should I tell her about my brother in the Liberal Party." David Ireland 1927- The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

"Prime Minster Howard I’ve heard You met George Bush and the Pope too, I understand, Oh I liked the Pope much better, I only had to kiss his hand." L’Amour Denis Kevans 1939-2005

"The first law of journalism-to confirm existing prejudice rather than contradict it." Alexander Cockburn

"The Labour Party [ALP], starting with a band of inspired Socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not know how to use the power when attained except for the profit of individuals[...] Such is the history of all Labour organisations in Australia, and not because they are Australian , but because they are Labour..." Victor Gordon Childe 1892-1957, How Labour Governs

"The trouble with a free market economy is that it requires so many policemen to make it work." Neal Ascherson, 1932- Games with the Shadows, Policing the Marketplace.

"The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. " Major General Smedley Butler,1881-1940

"What is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of founding one." Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?" Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

[Battler]" a conscientious person working against many odds to make a living; one whose life is a constant struggle.’ Battlers maybe men or women; black or white. They rarely deal with racism (the negative side of our tradition) because they sympathise with anyone facing adversity or unfair criticism. The term ‘battler’ is a state of mind-a traditional attitude which goes back to the convict era, when the battler was on a flogging to nothing but fiddled around the rules and held his masters in contempt. The battlers are aware that they are being lied to by....politicians; and they suspect that Keating’s warning that Australia could become a banana republic is in fact, happening before their eyes." Frank Hardy 1917-1994. Retreat Australia Fair 1990

I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer. Brendan Behan 1923-64

“I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.” Arundhati Roy